Sex and Crime: Oliver's Strange Journey (18 page)

Gina could tell that I was not just some
sleazy guy trying to get in her granddaughter's pants. She could
tell I was sincere and that I genuinely cared about Alice. She
understood that I didn't just see Alice as some drug addicted whore
and I didn't just want to use her as my vacation sex toy. Gina
loved me.

She was a very religious woman and told me
she believed God had sent me to save Alice's life. She literally
called me an angel sent by God. I was flattered, but it also made
me feel pretty awkward. I was honest with her and told her I'm not
religious at all. I told her I don't mind, if other people believe
in God and it enriches their lives. It just doesn't do anything for
me.

The one thing I didn't tell her was that
when I was a teenager, my hacker name used to be Lucifer. Gina
probably would have flipped out and tried to perform an exorcism on
me.

She couldn't understand why I don't believe
in God. I guess she had never really met someone who didn't believe
in something that was so fundamental in her own life.

I told her that I grew up in Northern
Europe, and people over there are far less religious than
Americans. To most Europeans, the bible is really nothing more than
a book of ancient fables, similar to Grimm's Fairy Tales. To them,
it's bizarre that so many Americans still believe in gods, devils,
angels and demons. It's like Americans are stuck in the Dark
Ages.

I explained to her that as a teenager in
Germany, I had studied theology at a catholic private school, and
some of my classmates actually ended up becoming priests. So it's
not like I hadn't heard the word of God before. And it's not like I
was ignorant about who Jesus was, or supposedly was.

In those theology classes, we had to read up
on different ancient philosophers. Some argued in favor of the
existence of God, and some argued against his existence. I knew
that I was supposed to write in my essays, why the philosophers who
believed in God were right. But honestly, I felt the philosophers
who said he didn't exist made a lot more sense to me.

There are two religious concepts that
contradict each other: There's the idea of free will, and then
there's the fatalist idea of predetermination. Those two ideas are
polar opposites. Free will means we are the masters of our own
future. Predetermination means God is in control of everything, and
everything that's about to happen to us was already predetermined
by someone other than ourselves, so our fate is not in our
hands.

Whenever you ask a believer why God allows
bad things to happen, they'll say that God doesn't interfere in
free will. If someone chooses to do something bad, and it has bad
consequences, it's supposedly not God's fault. He supposedly had
nothing to do with it. Because if he had stopped it, he would have
interfered in that person's free will.

But didn't God create the bad man, with all
his bad habits? No, the believers say. God is always good, God
never does anything bad, and anything bad about that man is a
result of his own free will.

Meanwhile, believers also say the exact
opposite, whenever it is convenient for them: everything happens
for a reason. Everything that happens is part of God's great plan.
If something happens that looks bad to us, it's just because we
don't understand God's great plan, and how that bad stuff fits into
the bigger picture.

Well, if it's true that everything that
happens is part of God's plan, then we really don't have free will
at all.

Take the Holocaust for example: why did God
allow Hitler to kill millions of innocent Jews? Because God didn't
want to step on Hitler's toes and interfere with his free will?
That's a pretty lame excuse. What about the free will of all those
Jews who died? I'm pretty sure that getting gassed to death was
obviously not their choice.

So, was the Holocaust part of God's great
plan? Is that why he allowed it to happen? Is that why God didn't
answer the prayers of all those Jews who begged him to make Hitler
drop dead?

Why didn't God just make Hitler have a heart
attack before he could start World War 2? Why didn't he simply
prevent Hitler from being born? How could a God who is supposed to
be all good all the time allow something like the Holocaust?

Or did God not just LET it happen? Maybe God
MADE the Holocaust happen, because everything that happens, happens
for a good reason? Are our minds simply too tiny, too inferior, to
understand God's divine plan? Are we just too stupid to see the
greater good that came out of the Holocaust?

If that were true, and everything that
happens, including the Holocaust, is part of God's perfect plan,
then that means that Hitler really wasn't a bad man at all. He was
actually doing God's work. And if Hitler did exactly what he was
supposed to do in God's great plan, then Hitler obviously didn't
have free will, but was just God's puppet. So that means Hitler was
a good guy. A man of God.

Sorry, but there is no religion in the world
that could sell me on believing THAT bullshit.

So that's my problem with free will versus
predetermination. But it gets worse: both of those concepts
contradict the idea that God answers prayers, like a genie in a
bottle who makes wishes come true.

If God didn't come down from heaven to smite
Hitler before he could kill millions of people, or at least snip
his fingers and make Hitler die of a heart attack before he could
start World War 2, although clearly millions of people were praying
to God for just that to happen, then why would God answer your
prayer when you have a flat tire and you're stuck all alone in the
woods? If God won't spare the lives of millions of innocent Jewish
men, women and children, then why would he answer your prayer when
you ask for your hospitalized grandpa not to die from cancer?

To me, prayer is completely useless as a
solution to any problem. It really just makes you feel better about
yourself, without actually doing anything to solve the problem. The
way I see it, it's really just a way for people who sit on their
asses and do nothing, to feel like they're magically helping
someone in need.

If Timmy needs a new kidney, don't sit at
home and talk to yourself and pretend you're helping Timmy by
talking to God for him. If you want to help Timmy, get off your ass
and donate some blood or collect money for a new kidney, or take
Timmy's parents into your home if they can no longer afford to pay
rent, because of the high medical bills. Do something!

And as far as Alice was concerned: It wasn't
going to help her one bit if I sit at home or at church and "talk
to God" about Alice. That wasn't going to do a damn thing for her.
Because if God didn't influence Hitler in any kind of positive way,
then why would God influence Alice in any kind of way, and violate
her free will by making her go to rehab or changing her mind about
liking drugs? And why would he do that anyway, if it's true that
everything happens for a reason, and her getting raped and abused
and becoming a drug addict was part of his great predetermined plan
to begin with?

I thought I had lost Gina when I told her
how I felt about all that, but she was actually very interested in
what I had to say and very open-minded. She listened to every word
I said, without making me feel like a crazy, blasphemous heathen
who was going to burn in hell for saying these things. She agreed
that there are a lot of hypocrites who go to church and pretend
they are good Christians, but then never really do anything to
actually help someone else.

I agreed. I told her that I have nothing
against God or religion. If believing in an invisible friend who
looks out for you makes you feel better about your life, why not?
If having religion in your life makes you do good things for other
people, why not?

My only problem with religion is that there
are so many self-righteous people who pretend to be good
Christians, and then really just do selfish, evil things,
supposedly in the name of their God. How can you claim that your
God has a problem with gay people? If God really created
everything, then he created everyone, black, white, straight, gay,
tall, short, Christian and Muslim. Don't go around telling other
people they won't go to heaven just because they won't buy into
your personal superstitions.

Gina asked me if I believed in heaven. I
told her that if there really is life after death, then it's a
natural process, that happens to everyone equally, whether they are
good or bad. Just like in my drowning example earlier. Everyone
drowns if their head is under water too long. It doesn't matter if
you are a good or a bad person.

And if human beings really have some kind of
spiritual energy or soul that can exist outside of the physical
body after death, then we all come equipped with one. And whatever
happens to that soul after death is just a natural process. As
natural as drowning.

Do I believe anything happens after death?
No. I think once we're dead, we're dead. You are who you are today,
because of all your past experiences. You burned your tongue on a
potato, and suddenly you don't like potatoes anymore. The color
purple reminds you of your prom and the first time you made love to
your spouse. So now you love the color purple. All that information
of who you are and what you like is stored in your brain.

Look at Alzheimer's patients. Somewhere in
their brain, they have information stored about their spouse of 40
years. Then that part of the brain is destroyed, the information is
lost, and suddenly they no longer remember who their spouse is.

Or look at car accident survivors with brain
damage. If the part of their brain is destroyed that stored their
vocabulary, or their reading skills, they can suddenly no longer
speak or read. Sure, through years of therapy they can try to learn
what they lost, but the fact remains that it was lost.

When you die, your brain is destroyed
completely, and everything in it, everything that makes you you, is
destroyed as well. Every bit of information that makes you who you
are today, is gone. And that's why I don't believe I'll continue to
float around as a ghost, or go to some kind of heaven, once my
brain has died.

Stephen Hawking, the famous wheelchair-bound
physicist, is considered by many to be the smartest man alive. The
Albert Einstein of our time. Hawking said: "I regard the brain as a
computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is
no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy
story for people afraid of the dark."

And Albert Einstein once wrote: "The word
god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human
weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still
primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish."

I would love it if Hawking and Einstein were
wrong. I love the idea of becoming some sort of immortal ghost that
can fly around the universe and explore other planets and stuff.
How cool would that be? But do I believe that's what's actually
going to happen? No. I'm pretty sure Hawking and Einstein are
right.

Do I think that believing in an invisible
man in the clouds will make any kind of difference in what happens
to me after death? No, not for a second.

If God actually existed, that'd be kinda
cool. Kinda like as if Superman or Spiderman were real. But they're
not. To me, God is really just Santa Claus for grown-ups. A cute
fairy tale that makes a lot of people feel all warm and fuzzy
inside, but beyond that God doesn't do anything for anyone. So
waiting for his help is pretty pointless. You have to help
yourself. Or hope that another human being, who cares about you,
will help you.

A lot of people simply believe in God,
because everyone else around them believes it, too. They never
actually took the time to really think about it on their own.

It's no coincidence that the bible keeps
telling you to obey and believe, not to think for yourself and ask
questions.

The bible is a tool. Throughout history,
dictators have used religion, and the bible, to manipulate the
masses. That's how and why the bible was created in the first
place. The Roman Emperor Constantine, a pagan himself, decided he
needed a tool to unify his fracturing empire. So he told a bunch of
Christians to put together a book. He offered them money, and they
produced the bible. And it has been a political tool to manipulate
the masses ever since the days of the Roman Empire, right up until
today.

How does one little guy with a funny
mustache take control over an entire country and gets to tell
millions of people what to do? By invoking God's will. Just like
every dictator before him.

Nowadays the Nazis are portrayed as pure
evil. But the reality is that most Nazis believed they were the
good guys during World War 2. They believed they were good
Christians. German soldiers wore belt buckles with the words "Gott
mit uns" (God is with us) engraved on them.

And Hitler's violent anti-Semitism really
was nothing new among Christians. He was a big fan of Martin
Luther, the German who, a few hundred years earlier, had more or
less single-handedly started the Protestant movement. Martin
Luther, one of the founding fathers of the branch of Christianty
that dominates America today, was viciously anti-Semitic. He hated
Jews and felt they were the root of all evil and they needed to be
driven out of Europe or killed. He promoted the idea of a Holocaust
hundreds of years before Hitler was even born. You never heard
about that in your church, have you? I'm not surprised. But, well,
it's true. Google it.